Lexington doesn’t like all this pious admiration for small town folk:

Isn’t America supposed to be a meritocracy? Two-thirds of Americans reject the idea that people’s chances in life are determined by circumstances that are beyond their control, a far higher proportion than in Europe. Almost 90% say that they admire people who have got rich through hard work. Yet whenever elections come around politicians treat the people at the bottom of the heap as the embodiment of American values.

This is, of course, more or less inevitable in a mass democratic society, which delights in nothing if not the celebration of the ordinary and the glorification of the mediocre.  Snobbery and the resentment of snobbery (and it is really snobbery, and not elitism as such, that we have all been discussing) are always going to exist in societies with significant upward social mobility.  The more opportunities available to people through merit (or at least largely through merit), the more pretensions the arrivistes will put on to demonstrate that they do, in fact, belong in their new status group.  Snobbery may not be limited to arrivistes, which is to say those who have succeeded in making their own way, but I suspect it is most obvious among these people, because they are the ones who most have to prove that they have adopted the mentality associated with their new status and their new peers.   

Still, elite Hyde Park resident that I am, I was thinking about why the charge of “elitism” is so popular as I was walking to campus this morning.  I was reminded of Ober’s Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, which explained how a city with a democratic regime continued to acknowledge and tolerate a wealthy social elite and continued to invest them with power.  The elites were able to retain the respect and toleration of the masses, rather than, say, having their wealth confiscated and being driven out of the city, because of two things: the liturgies that they performed at their own expense as their fulfillment of civic obligations, and their respect for the citizens and a careful avoidance of emphasising social and economic superiority.  This is what kept the social elite from becoming, and from being perceived as, oligarchs who threatened the political status of the mass of citizens.  Because elites are unavoidable in any political or social arrangement, and some measure of inequality in the distribution of power and wealth is always going to exist, it is not usually these things in themselves that rankle people, even those who have been conditioned to believe in equality, but any behaviour that seeks to dwell on inequalities, including inequalities of education or status, and either implicitly or explicitly denigrates the non-elite becomes intolerable. 

I think this is why it is so popular to bash politically activist actors, whose salaries the very same people have no problem helping to pay by going to see their movies and buy the DVDs.  It isn’t the wealth, fame or status of these people that offends, but the presumption that this status, which is built almost entirely on popular acclaim, entitles the actor to then lecture the people on anything.  And it really is the feeling of being lectured to that drives people crazy, which is why politicians of left and right who come across as hectoring, condescending or arrogant usually deeply alienate a lot of voters.  This is the “who do you think you are?” response that we hear voiced so often.  Of course, one man’s condescending elite is sometimes another man’s principled speaker of important truths, because the kinds of “elitism” that people care about depend greatly on the spheres of life in which they believe they have the most at stake.  Thus social conservatives tend to get exercised about corporate elitism only when corporations overtly promote or sell things that strike the conservatives as profane, lewd or immoral, but they will reach for their guns if someone suggests that it is the concentrated wealth and power of corporations and the heavy economic dependence on them that make them effectively unaccountable to the community.  

Evidently, there are a lot of people on the left who find the controversy over Obama’s San Francisco remarks absolutely infuriating because he ”told the truth” and is being punished for it, but for everyone else the remarks were not just condescending–they were insulting because they were false.  More than that, a politician presumed to know why people did or believed certain things, when he probably cannot know their motives and, more importantly, shouldn’t care.  In an election, it is the politician’s motives, his beliefs, that are at issue.  The pol is the one who is supposed to be scrutinised by the voters, not vice versa. 

Update: As Caleb Stegall points out in a new post at Taki’s Magazine, the servility and dependency that I alluded to above are the real causes of the discontent and bitterness of a lot of Americans.  The awareness of this dependency may be made more acute during economic downturns, but it is always there, and it is made perfectly clear when they find that their concerns about immigration and trade (policies again decided by the dynatoi against the voters’ interests) are ignored and, indeed, are being psychoanalysed as displaced anxiety about the economy.  Caleb is right: what embitters is powerlessness.  Economic grievances come into it only to the extent that economic changes reflect the dependency on those who have no concern for your interests, and so underscore how powerless you are.  This just drives home the point that there is nothing that Obama is offering that would even attempt to change this dynamic.

Filed under: culture, politics